by Ed DeCecco
For the seventy-fifth time, the Colorado House of Representatives and Senate will convene for two regular sessions and, if recent history is any indication, a special session or two. (Being the seventy-fifth makes it seem like the General Assembly has reached a milestone age or is celebrating its diamond jubilee, doesn’t it?)
Like your predecessors, you, the members of the Seventy-fifth General Assembly, will converge on our magnificent State Capitol from all parts of this amazing state. You will elect your leadership, adopt and follow rules of legislative procedure, and debate and decide the important issues of your time. You will have late nights in committee and lengthy debates on the House or Senate floor. Many of you will feel like you have achieved great success, but, alas, some of you will also feel the sting of failure. But whether you are a Democrat, Republican, or Independent, over the course of the 120 days of session, you will all do your very best to represent the Coloradans who elected you.
And through it all, the Office of Legislative Legal Services (OLLS) will do our very best to help you! Created by statute and with the oversight of the Committee on Legal Services, the OLLS is your nonpartisan legal staff agency. Our primary function aligns with your primary purpose for being here—we draft bills, resolutions, and amendments. But we can also provide you with ancillary materials related to those bills, resolutions, and amendments, such as:
- Unbiased talking points explaining bills or amendments;
- Summaries of changes made to a bill in committee or in either chamber;
- Legislative histories;
- Comparisons of Colorado law with the law of other states on particular issues; and
- Written legal memoranda and opinions on issues relating to pending legislation. (We can provide these resources on other topics related to your legislative work, too.)
The attorney who drafts legislation stays with it throughout the entire legislative process. So if you have any questions about a bill or resolution, ask the attorney whose name and number are listed on the first page of each bill or resolution. Whether during a private conversation on the side of the House or Senate chamber or at the witness table during a committee hearing, OLLS attorneys are happy to answer your questions.
Beyond all of these listed services, if you need anything, please ask us. If it is something that we can provide, we will do it. Of course, we cannot do anything that compromises our nonpartisan status, such as soliciting legislators as sponsors, disclosing confidential information related to a bill, helping you count votes, or advocating for the passage or defeat of legislation. Nonpartisanship is so deeply engrained in our office’s culture that we would probably be terrible at doing these tasks anyway!
But where our office excels is providing the nonpartisan legal services and support that you need to have a productive and successful legislative session in 2025. So whether by phone, text, Zoom, or an in-person visit to our current location in Room 091 on the ground floor of the Capitol,[1] we encourage you to reach out to the staff of the OLLS whenever you need legal assistance. We look forward to helping you, which in turn will help the Seventy-fifth General Assembly make its mark on our great state.
[1] The OLLS is moving to the State Annex Building in the Fall of 2025.
